1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mass storage system with improved usage of buffer capacity, and more specifically to a mass storage system for real-time data storage with an embedded controller.
2. Discussion of related art
Embedded stand-alone systems designed for storing real-time data streams with a high data rate coming directly from a data stream source, e.g. a film camera, can generally be split up into two kinds of data processing:
1. Real-time video data storage with a guaranteed data rate, and
2. Non real-time data storage such as file system information managed by an embedded processor.
Both data paths have to be connected to an I/O controller, which implements the I/O communication with storage units forming a mass storage array.
A high guaranteed data rate is reached by parallelization of single storage units such as hard disks, optical disks, or solid state based memories. The above types of storage units often introduce significant latency at the start of a transfer. Since latency is a problem especially when real-time behavior is needed, memory with no or at least no significant access latency such as SRAM and/or SDRAM is introduced. Other requirements, particularly for mobile applications, are that the whole storage system has to be as small as possible and to have a reduced power consumption.